The weekly update, now with 172% more sass

Savith asked where the sass was in my updates about France, so I've tried to include a bit this week.

Things I have learned since I've been in France:
01. French people are very good at parallel parking their tiny cars on the sidewalk.
02. The book A Year In the Merde wasn't lying about the dogs and watching where you step.
03. Food is an art form.
04. Americans don't like old things.
05. Every American tv show is dubbed into French except for House, which is the only one I want to watch. Zut alors.

Things I have learned from French people in the last week:
01. French people aren't good at learning languages.
02. British people aren't good at learning languages.
03. Americans are good at learning languages, and that's a little strange since we don't really border much of anyone, but maybe it's part of our impulse to take over the world.
04. Politics are really important, nobody sane likes Sarkozy but they're not sure that the woman candidate can win, and Hillary Clinton would be the best candidate to elect in 2008 if we want to repair our relations with Europe.
05. Americans are more welcoming, but French people will write you letters for longer because they forge stronger relationships, just more slowly.

So yes, there's plenty of sass. Sass for my students, who like to pretend they don't speak English at all and they can't understand my fairly neutral accent. Sass for the random people who pass in the street and come up with the only English phrases they know ("Hello, how are you?" I swear it's like being back in India except the accents are different). Sass for the old people with their dogs taking up the entire sidewalk.

But then I get up in the morning and have a cup of tea in our little girly kitchen, and I watch the students coming to school, and I walk up the brick sidewalks to stand under the Porte de Notre Dame to wait for Christine to take me to Caudry. And I think, how lucky am I to be here, shivering in the morning cold under a piece of a medieval fortification, watching the sun come up over the roofs of the old, narrow houses packed together in the old, narrow streets that are still mostly cobblestone, and it's amazing. No doubt it will be even more amazing when they start paying us. The French bureaucracy is astoundingly complicated, much as the French grammar is, and it wouldn't be difficult to navigate except that everyone keeps giving us conflicting instructions. I have to get a couple more papers in order before I can apply for my carte de séjour and be officially allowed to stay beyond the term of my visa (which doesn't expire for another couple of months anyway), but after that, I'll be golden (and go to Belgium some weekend).

I should talk about the people I refer to collectively as my housemates/roommates, because really they aren't all my housemates, and I'm not sharing a room with any of them. I live at the Lycée Fénelon with Cata, who's from Costa Rica, and Michelle, an English girl from Liverpool. We share the petite maison blanche, which is rather famous for being a party zone, but we don't plan to make it quite so notorious this year. They both teach at Fénelon, although Michelle also teaches at the collège, or junior high, Catalina teaching Spanish and Michelle teaching English (though she knows Spanish). They're both very friendly and we enjoy dancing around in the living room. Cary, a rather interesting fellow from Georgia ( U.S.) is in our house all the time but technically lives in the lycée. He teaches English and speaks German, and he wants to go to law school, so he's caught up in that a lot of the time. But he's promised to give me piano lessons in exchange for cooking (lessons), so that's nice.

Despite the fact that I technically live with those people, I often refer to the people I formerly lived with as my housemates. Anna, Katie, and Steffen all teach at the Lycée and collège Paul Duez. Anna and Katie are American (Anna likes teaching and knows Italian and Katie lived in South Africa and Sweden and knows a lot of things even if she's a little spacy) and Steffen's German (and enjoys fishing and whistling), and we are one small happy family. I really spend most of my time with them, partly because I know them better (since I knew them first) and partly because we are always cooking together because I keep buying groceries with them. Anna and I threw a dinner party last Sunday and it was a delightful success. I have gotten them all hooked on House and we watch together, which is hilarious because they're all squeamish and start cringing at the least hint that there's going to be one of those internal animations, and because there are four of us squished together on the couch we made out of a spare mattress and three chairs.

There are a couple of other assistants around too. A German, Ellen, who was supposed to live in my room but who lives in Arras with her boyfriend. An Austrian, Matthias, who works at my school and barely speaks French. Anne, an American, whom no one really knows but whom Katie discovered at the train station one day. It's a fairly companionable situation, really. Quite pleasant.

It's getting coldish. The French don't turn on their heat until the middle of October, apparently, and it's freezing in the Lycée Jaquard and at the apartment of the Paul Duez assistants, though there's plenty of heat at my house. We have big plans to buy a washing machine; the school said they'd pay for the plumbing work if we bought the machine, and that saves a lot of hassle (though no dryers, just drying racks, but we have the heaters and we might buy a fan). All conveniences at home! Internet, phone service, and laundry. How delightful.

I've started teaching. The students are not very good, to put it politely, because all the best students go to the bigger, nicer schools in Cambrai. This school is half a professional high school and half for kids interested in science and math and such, which means they care less about English. But I will persevere! The kids have started talking to me, and it is true that some classes are much better than others. I started with a weak, shy group of girls, but the classes I've had since then have been a lot better. The profs are nice. I spend a lot of time in the teachers' lounge because I'm only teaching 12 hours a week anyway and they all come in and do the bises (the little kisses) and tease each other about things and pretend to have fights and make fun of their students. Christine, who's been taking me to and from school, offered to do my laundry and said she'd take me to the doctor if I felt sick, and that I could come over for Christmas if I were going to be alone. The cafeteria ladies knew I was vegetarian the second time I went in, and they always serve me big plates of vegetables. I like it here. I amused my colleagues by color-coding my picture lists of students (which for some bizarre reason are called "trombinoscopes"), and they have patience with my bad French (apparently I'm better at speaking than the England-English English assistant was last year, confirming their theories), and every day I kiss a lot of people whose names I don't know, but only on the cheek.

France (well, Europe really) remembers its history the way the US doesn't. On the tramways in Lille, passengers are asked to give up their seats for those with war wounds, and there are memorials and plaques for the World Wars everywhere. We don't make jokes about the wars around Steffen and Ellen. It's interesting to see. You can feel the time on your skin, almost, like something extra in the air. It makes my throat hurt when I go jogging on the slippery cobblestones (or maybe I'm catching catarrh, because that's a great word).

So. Life is good, and interesting, and I am well pleased with my general situation.